November 30, 2016

Why Nandan Nilekani is bullish on demonetisation

“From my perspective, the shock to the system, I think, will give a
big boost to digitisation. In the last seven years, the infrastructure
for digital financial services — Aadhar, UPI the JAM infrastructure,
USSD and micro-ATMs — have been laid down. What, I thought, would take
3-6 years to roll out, I now believe that, with the urgency of the
matter, will happen in 3-6 months,” Nilekani said in an interview with
NDTV on Monday.

Explaining his “theory” further, the co-founder of Infosys
said that India is going to see a “massive acceleration of the
digitisation of Indian economy for financial services” in the next 3-6
months.

For instance, he said India has about 1-1.5 million PoS (point of
sale) machines installed in the last 30-40 years. The PoS machine allows
card-based transactions. He said the number of PoS would “double or
triple in the next 3-6 months.”